European History

Problems of Germany After World War I

Germany's new democratic government, the so-called Weimar Republic, faced serious problems following the Treaty of Versailles. Though Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and the wartime military leadership had lost its authority, Germans widely refused to admit that their army had lost the war. A significant number believed that Germany could have continued to fight and eventually gotten the upper hand, and that surrender was a "stab in the back" of an army capable of winning the war.

While this severely undermined the credibility of the new republic, the notion that the German army could have continued the war and eventually won is rejected by most historians, due to the introduction of fresh U.S. forces and Germany's weakness after four years of battle. In fact, in late 1918 the German High Command, facing a powerful Allied offensive toward German soil and exhaustion of their own troops, turned in desperation to Germany's democratic politicians and asked them to form a government which the Allies would find acceptable for negotiations.

Immediately after the war, the Weimar Republic encountered severe economic problems. Millions of demobilized soldiers arrived home to find little or no work. Hunger was widespread. In addition, France and Britain owed war debts to the United States, and in order to pay them demanded reparation from Germany. Germany was unable to pay, so France seized the industrial towns of the Ruhr valley. The German response was to print money to pay the unemployed workers of the Ruhr, which resulted in massive hyperinflation in Germany.

Politically, there was near-chaos for several years, as fringe political groups on both the left and the right openly and violently battled each other and the central government. The Spartacists, or communists, staged uprisings in Berlin and other cities and briefly seized power in Bavaria. The Freikorps, various bands of demobilized soldiers who did not want to lay down their arms, crushed the Bavarian coup d'etat. However, the Freikorps also sought to overthrow the Weimar Republic's government with a coup of their own in 1920, which failed when German workers responded with a general strike.

This was the atmosphere in 1919 when a small right-wing party in Munich took in a new member, an army corporal named Adolf Hitler. A skilled orator and politician, Hitler rapidly rose to head the National Socialist German Worker's Party, known as the Nazis.